The will of the patient is of growing importance in the medical encounter. People are increasingly addressed as accountable decision takers, which produces questions and problems with regard to medical, legal, ethical, political and practical aspects. This is particularly true for so called end-of-life-decisions. Between the years 2003 and 2009 a vivid public debate and multiple political efforts concerning the regulation of end-of-life-decisions have taken place in Germany. At the center... Read more ...

Knowledge is now central in governing. It has become both vehicle and substance of policy. How does this challenge democracy? Read more ...

In Europe, information and expertise are now both more widely distributed and more readily accessible than ever before. At the same time, expectations of transparency and public accountability have increased. In many ways, knowledge is coming to play a new role in policy: we can now distinguish ’post-bureaucratic’ from conventional ’bureaucratic’ regimes and show that each presupposes a specific kind of knowledge and a specific way of using it. While bureaucratic modes of governance require ‘established’ bodies of knowledge to be translated into ‘vertical’ regulations; post-bureaucratic modes of governance consist rather in attempting to turn actors’ autonomy and reflexivity into a means of governing.